From the Ashes of Black Legion
In the September of 2015, Black Legion Alliance lived in the Fountain region, having evicted Brave Newbies Alliance and taken all the money moons in the region. With Elo away from the game and Aegis Sov recently released, leadership in BL decided to move to lowsec and do stuff there. My corp, Higher Than Everest [P3AK], having deployed to the Cloud Ring/Fountain border in search of PVP, decided that lowsec was ‘not our jam’ and would be staying in 0.0 . Seeing the potential in Aegis sov for small gang PVP, I wanted to try it out and do a bit of adapting. I decided that probably the next big conflict would be against the, then northern-based, Cluster Fuck Coalition. My corp’s chosen base of J5A was excellently placed to take advantage of this.
Talking with the active leadership in BL, I offered to hold a single constellation in Fountain, right next to Cloud Ring, in case lowsec didn’t work out and everyone wanted to come back. As some people will remember, Elo Knight then returned to retake the reins of Black Legion and in the process killed the alliance. The corps all decided to leave and do their own thing. Higher Than Everest continued with the plan to remain in 0.0, only now we needed a new alliance. So I decided to create one.
Having been in BL for two brilliant years, I was ready to give up the nomad lifestyle of living risk-free in NPC stations around New Eden. It was time to put some skin in the game, live in conquerable 0.0 sov, and see if we could survive amongst the massive coalitions of the time.
With the initially unpopular name ‘The-Culture [-TC-]’ (I’d been reading Iain M Banks at the time), the ethos for our new alliance was born. Several corporations from BL decided they wanted to help try and make The-Culture work for various reasons of their own. Some still had money moons across the region and were making excellent corp income. Others remembered being in Brick Squad, the previous alliance I had lead as military commander. They wanted to enjoy those old times of taking sov and beating back invaders.
The-Culture flourished, taking more money moons from the power vacuum left as the CFC shrunk its borders, adjusting to the new environment dictated by the Aegis’ occupation-based sov system. Times were good. Raknor Bile, my old friend from the Brick Squad days, worked tirelessly leading fleets to take any and all valuable moons within our capital sphere of control. We never over extended our sovereignty, not leaving ourselves open for troll entosis or genuine attacks outside of our mainly European time-zone strength. We tried to let as many other entities live in Fountain along side us, without having ‘coward’ agreements that kept everyone feeling safe and secure. I didn’t want us to be safe; safety meant complacency and ruin, as I had experienced before with Brick Squad.
And so the dislike for TC began to brew within all our neighbours in Aridia, Outer Ring and Fountain. The collection of alliances known as F-core, living in the untouchable NPC stations central to Fountain, were our first adversary. They owned moons given to them by BL during the war against Brave Newbies. We took some of those money moons with much admirable resistance from F-core. At this time TC was small, and F-core’s alliances we large and many. It was a fair matching in regards to numbers, but superior FC’s (Raknor Bile), unification of purpose, infrastructure, and the more modern methods of war passed to TC from our BL days, meant we won almost every objective and bloodied the nose of the opposing FC’s. Again we refrained from over-stretching and only took the moons that were within direct range of our home systems. F-core lost some moons and retained some moons. This seemed fair to us.
World War Bee
My memory of TC’s timeline is without doubt patchy, but sometime around two to three months after our inception, as predicted, World War Bee started to bubble into life. Initially, the now-rebranded and monetized Imperium, previously the Clusterfuck Coalition, started to rustle feathers with its inflammatory ‘Viceroy Program’ and book kickstarter. SpaceMonkeys Alliance [SMA] decided they was some hot shit and got into drama with the owners of the casino IWANTISK.com. This resulted in the contract against them taken by TISHU, an alliance sporting many ex-BL warriors within its ranks. I don’t think anyone needs to read my revisionist history of the start of WWB, but here I go anyway. TC harassed SMA mercilessly, adding to TISHU’s punishing black-ops campaign with our own small gang PVP. At the time we called the groups attacking the Imperium, in literal whispers on TS, the ‘shadow Coalition.’ We reinforced one of the first important jump bridge I-Hubs linking Cloud Ring to the greater Imperium regions. This involved fighting two Hurricane gangs from Goonswarm and SMA of equal size to our own Ferox fleet. We won this fight handily, killing twice as many Hurricanes than we had Feroxes in our fleet. I believe Exodus turned up for the USTZ entosis event and killed the I-hub. SMA’s blood was in the water and the sharks were circling.
Pandemic Legion had yet to join in the building conflict and so, as we were one of the few groups getting involved that lived in vulnerable sov space the CFC/Imperium could strike back at, we felt it best not to take contracts from the casino owners who were throwing mountains of ISK at anyone with a pulse. Once the Legion committed to leading the push against the Imperial north, followed by the battle of M-O and CO2’s defection, the writing was on the wall. The Mittani sounded the Fabian victory horn and advanced to a soda warehouse in lowsec (a Quafe warehouse station).
Near the end of WWB a few of our neighbours decided that the TC money moons located in their space shouldn’t be owned by The-Culture. Cede Nulli and Violence of Action started their campaign to harass and take these moons. Higher Than Everest deployed into one of the Dysprosium POS deep behind enemy lines and began small gang PVP operations, which ended in Cede Nulli’s evacuation of Fountain. We then turned the alliance’s full attention onto VOA and, after some great fights over the just-launched citadels, we evicted them from Fountain by force. Much talk was made within TC leadership that we should leave the newly vacated space empty and allow someone to move into it, instead I decided to rent it out. This would be one of the first instances where I, Harvey Skywarker, ignored the other CEOs in TC and reminded them this is not an alliance lead by committee but one lead by tyranny. TC now had two lucrative constellations of renters tucked away in the most isolated pocket of Fountain. I’ll let history decide if I was right or wrong.
In the citadel anchoring fights during those campaigns, Lowsechnaya Sholupen, White Legion and F-core joined VOA and Cede Nulli in a coalition of anti-TC alliances that Raknor Bile defeated resoundingly. As a response to this dogpiling against us, we evicted LSH from Fountain and took a few more of F-core’s moons. The decision was made to allow LSH to put down fresh TCUs in its constellations next to Aridia, but we would not let them have any I-hubs in Fountain. To this day, neither LSH nor their allies W.A.S.T.Y.A have held an I-hub for longer than a few days, although they were happy to rat the belts.
The following months were pockmarked with sporadic fights in ‘Content Ring’ against the good-natured Hordelings and TISHU. But for the most part Fountain was quiet, until the now-Delve -dwelling Imperium decided to reap some revenge for our part in WWB. The Mittani announced that all TC’s SCSAA’s in fountain must die. Luckily, with some foresight, when hearing that the Imperium was moving to Delve, our neighbouring region, I had ordered all supercapital and titan construction to be finished. Unfortunately for one member of TC who either didn’t get the memo or ignored it and kept building, one titan was under construction at the time of the Imperial campaign. I believe this titan had been partly paid for upfront by its future owner in the now defunct lowsec alliance Escalating Entropy, RIP. The Imperium came in full revitalised force and blotted out the sun with its space chariots. All of TC’s POS with SCSAAs attached died in a fire, including the one building a titan. In the process an entire Bhaalgorn fleet was laid waste by TC and our batphones NCdot, GOTG and PL, among others. This taught the Imperium that for one, its Bhaalgorn doctrine was rubbish, and that the Imperium needed to be careful getting its super and titan fleet isolated on the ‘wrong side’ of Fountain. TC rolled with the punches and planned for the introduction of the Sotiyo engineering complex with its super capital production facilities.
In the following months The Mittani announced another campaign, this time against Raknor Bile’s R64s, aka our prized money moons. The sun was again blotted out by the great unwashed host of Imperium pilots sent to claim our beloved moons. This time we did not bother batphoning any of our friends; we knew the campaign objectives declared by The Mittani were unfeasible. There was no way the Imperium could hold moons in our space, unlike those groups whose space we held moons in, we knew we would be able to kill any enemy POS in our staging systems. It seemed the Imperial FC’s assigned the task also knew this, because they brought the Red Menace Coalition along for the ride and gave them the job of towering captured moons in TC space. These Red POS were reinforced mere minutes after the Imperium/RMC fleets took their bridges home, and were killed uncontested in the following days. When the campaign finished it was revealed that actually it was us that were the idiots, The Mittani informed all of Eve that his attacks in Fountain, despite forcing us to keep eyes in their staging (something we usually don’t have), were a distraction while The Imperium onlined its first Keepstar. We are all such fools.
A New Day, A New War
Off the back of this ‘victorious’ Imperium campaign, RMC decided it wanted to evict us from Fountain, or maybe they just wanted to move into the F-core side of Fountain. It was hard to tell their objectives because everything they did was, from our point of view, “increasingly retarded and unfocused.” Eventually the RMC abandoned whatever its objectives were, and returned to its Period Basis home. We could not follow RMC to continue the bullying, as Period Basis is nestled safely behind Imperium space.
During all these campaigns, F-core repeatedly choose to either outright blue or just assist the Imperium, Russians, and anyone else that came to Fountain to have a go at TC. In my opinion this is what ultimately harmed their active members and so ability to achieve anything in the region. They kept putting themselves in a situation where the only targets they had to camp and blops drop were us in TC. We had long ago put in place, what are now standard practices across New Eden, procedures which neutralised their efforts to hurt us, like having cynos on capitals with FAX on standby. They strayed from their traditional methods of waging guerrilla warfare against everyone who moves into Fountain around the NPC core.
F-core’s continued aiding of our enemies prompted us to take the rest of their moons in Fountain, even the ones that were awkwardly far from our staging systems. I also deployed just my corp into the centre of F-core’s power base. P3AK fought F-core day after day next to their staging system in the NPC stations of the core, turning the tables on F-core’s ‘fight the blob’ narrative we defeated their fleets with fewer dudes than they fielded against us. This was a wake-up call which, to their credit, F-core responded well to. They seemed to draw in their fragmented groups of pilots, and after some honest respectful chats in local, they appeared to lose some of the inflated opinion they had of themselves, so I called ‘op success’ and took P3AK back to TC staging on our side of Fountain’s great divide. With all their moons lost, FreeGates Coalition, an alliance within F-core, finally gave up on Fountain, and split up to join various different alliances elsewhere. Some rebellious leaders in F-core came to talk with Raknor and myself about calling a truce to our rivalry, and perhaps becoming blue to help them find themselves again. We told them we’d like to help and wanted them to survive but making more blues was not going to revive F-core, we advised they stop blueing people in Fountain and attack all comers, including TC.
While our attention was focused elsewhere, LSH had placed an I-hub in D4KU at the Aridia border, and was carrier ratting up the ADM. We tackled this carrier on their Astrahus, and I dropped my Nyx on it in a simple gank. This is important, because a few weeks later I was warned by a guy within LSH’s lowsec coalition that they were baiting a TC Nyx. When asked which Nyx, he linked my alt. I was a bit confused because I didn’t have my Nyx logged in, and wasn’t aware of the bait carrier ratting again in D4KU. We woke up the troops, moved dreads, and with what I thought was enough FAX, we logged off the capitals and a proteus fleet ready to counter with our own trap in range of D4KU. I flew the same small gang that had caught the previous carrier down to D4KU and tackled the LSH bait. My informant told me that his LSH FC was talking about some ‘friends’ being ready, so we scouted Aridia with neutral characters and spotted a few RMC rattlesnakes logging off in Aridia. Clearly everyone was trying to login trap everyone else, and all that was needed to start the dominos falling was my Nyx coming in to kill the ‘ratting carrier.’ After trying to trigger the escalations with a single TC dread, LSH countered with a single FAX.
At this point I said “Fuck it. I don’t mind losing my Nyx. Let’s just get this started.”
Now obviously I didn’t want my super to die, but I was prepared to take the risk just for a good old brawl between bitter enemies. Leela Farnsworth’s Nyx entered the grid and the effect was immediate, characters logged in on both sides, LSH jumped in some dreads followed by TC’s larger dread fleet, followed again by the RMC dreads and the RMC Rattlesnakes. The brawl got real pretty fast. My Nyx exploded under the unexpectedly large number of RMC and LSH dreads, and the disappointingly low number of TC FAX. Many dreads exploded. All the TC dreads died, and some RMC/LSH dreads managed to jump out under the cover of the Rattlesnake fleet. TC’s finally mid-pointed supers and titans made it onto the field in time to scare away the Rattlers and secure the loot from 50+ dead capitals. Loot which easily covered the SRP of my Nyx.
Every action has consequences. So we deployed TC to Aridia and took the majority of LSH’s money moons, in the process having a brawl of TC Machs vs RMC/LSH+allies Tempests, we bled hard and ISK wars were lost, but the troops got some much-needed action with all our FAX getting SRP. One hidden bonus was Lord Servant leaving TC after that fleet.
On our return to Fountain staging I took P3AK to a constellation on the far side of Fountain and evicted Soviet Union, who had come to Fountain as refugees from TEST’s war in the south. We got some ok fights, one corp vs one alliance. Highlights being me bosoning an entire Cerberus fleet with a drag bubble on their way home. They had redeployed back into an NPC station once we won our first entosis event, so their route home was predictable. Winning an entosis event with fewer people than the defenders was quite the challenge which my boys thrived on. After the dead I-hub and bosoned fleet, they gave up and evacuated back to Stain.
A new contender entered Fountain: Heathens Coalition, made up of Iron Armada, Feign Disorder and Wild Hunt, who were yet again blue’d by F-core. Sigh. A USTZ coalition, they set about attacking TC moons in their staging system, as all our sov and citadels were set vulnerable in our EUTZ prime. TC’s USTZ members found themselves having to fight a well lead and equally sized enemy with home advantage; the Heathens very cleverly adjusted and re-shipped to counter or match whatever fleet composition we set out in from our distant staging system. The summer months were taking their toll on our active membership, and one of our USTZ corporations, who had drifted into inactivity due to ‘lack of content’, decided to leave TC for greener pastures. Fresh USTZ fleet commanders stepped up and took on the challenge of the Heathen’s moon attacks. One POS was lost by TC, only to be retaken in the following days. Heathens, making limited headway with POS that could be timed for our EU-prime, focused their assaults on low-ADM contested zones between the various alliances allied to TC.
At this point it is worth noting that ‘the other side of Fountain’ had become a healthy war-zone, with each alliance securely holding a single constellation and fighting over the largely useless connecting space between them. I am proud that we fostered this environment, which we deliberately stayed out of, to let the groups there have their content without big old TC stomping in to spoil it. Summer was here and I went on holiday for a month.
Two alliances were blue to TC on that side of Fountain; It’s Only Pixels had originally asked for blue while they moved into the ‘fight club’ some months previously, but after being cool guys and also being far enough away from us to provide little content if we reset, we decided to keep each other blue. IGC was a group that Pixels extended the same courtesy of blue standings to, we tried to keep them neutral but with joint Pixel/IGC fleets bumping into our own gangs it was simpler to blue them also.
The Sun Sets Peacefully on Fountain
On my return to Eve, after a lovely sunny summer sailing and drinking back with my family, I could see that the strain on TC’s diminished USTZ was taking its toll and numbers were at an all-time low. Much talk had been made of TRI and CO2’s wars in the south, and membership asked if we should deploy the alliance south to get involved. I made the decision immediately on my return that The-Culture would not be in Fountain by October 24, the day CCP takes away the last cross-timezone content driver. I have no interest in mining, and only a very few of TC’s members were still Rorqual mining, having mined and built their desired titan or super. The moons we’ve held have made every corp in TC rich. What the CEO’s did with this ISK is their business, but P3AK used it to buy corp doctrines, to wage our various campaigns around Fountain, and build up FAX caches to support our titans and supers. We also gave titans to the people who had put the maximum effort into P3AK and TC as reward for their services.
The following month we spent decommissioning as much TC infrastructure as possible, to withdraw the maximum possible ISK value that we had sunk into Fountain. All corps had been given guidelines and a timeline of our withdrawal to minimise line member trauma. I don’t know if other entities in Eve have tried to withdraw from their long-term home in a similar fashion, without some enemy at the gates forcing the abandonment of otherwise retrievable assets, but it is quite the undertaking. When we started the long process of waking our sleeping members to consolidate and prepare for the largest move of TC’s history so far, we were under no pressure from our neighbours or enemies alike. Due to some misconceptions that we were ‘fail cascading’ or that this was some kind of rout, some factions tried to increase their pressure against us. We defended ourselves as much as possible, saving I-hubs that would, in a matter of weeks, be self-destructed. We kept doing our thing; one Heathen I-hub and a few TCUs were killed, along with several smaller goon fleets that tried to get things done with less than 100 pilots.
Most notably The Imperium launched another campaign against TC. As was the pattern for these campaigns, everyone in Fountain had been talking with the Imperials and made promises of assistance to ensure their survival. I can only assume they are all happy with Fountain as a Imperial rental region, where the entire region is safe for ratting and mining in peace.
The Heathens used their USTZ strength to anchor a Fortizar, on their side of the great Fountain divide, which they then transferred to The Imperium as an initial staging for assaults into TC held space. Operations were then launched to remove our I-hub from C-N to facilitate the anchoring of another Fortizar on our side of the divide. We successfully defended against this attack by winning the first two entosis events, thanks to Aegis sov and its requirement for the defenders to avoid fighting. This suited us because we have 50-80 man fleets, and the Imperium fleets numbered roughly 350-400 minimum. We did ask for help from our old MBC friends, who sent some claw fleets.
I’ll say this of Aegis sov: it can work on a small scale, providing potential for challenging constellation-wide struggles, but when scaled up to the coalition level it simply does not deliver anything good. Sorry, CCP. I have in the past been an advocate of players adapting and using entosis mechanics to trigger combat and content, but the sad truth is the system doesn’t deliver when pushed to its inevitable extremes. In the end, the players adapted all too well, finding methods to win with maximum efficiency which in the end means winning without ever having a proper fight. But on the flip side in previous iterations of sov mechanics we may not have been able to exist in Fountain at all, let alone contest and win this timer. It’s swings and roundabouts, I guess.
In giving TC plenty of warning about our withdrawal I made a fatal miscalculation. Most Corps within TC, aside from my own [P3AK], immediately started moving their shit out of Fountain, selling doctrine ships, nuking rigs, and packing their capitals. With the result being when we wanted to form a fleet in the final month, our numbers were trash and people didn’t have the correct ships. I lost my shit repeatedly. The fault is my own, I probably didn’t communicate clearly enough that the timeline was real and that we would be leaving when it said and not before. The original plan had been to start move ops, after Eve Vegas, on October 10, we moved this forward to the fourth when I realised everyone was packed and waiting to go. The corporation [MAMBA] , after taking years of abuse for being trash and recruiting from the B4R forum, finally decided to leave TC and join NCdot. I had informed all corp CEO/Dir to tell their guys not to put in anymore super/titan builds, Mamba kept building because…Just Mamba things. In the process of self-destructing our sov to hand it over to The Initiative, I nuked the I-hub linked to Mambas Sotiyo. RIP, Nyx.
With Mamba gone, the final nail had been hammered into our dysfunctional USTZ’s coffin. I sighed with relief. The only ones I’ll miss from our USTZ is Lew from DISSD and the very competent line members of W.LST.
Our Keepstar and about ten Fortizars have been sold to The Imperium. As The Imperium leadership still pretend not to know who I am, I again deployed Raknor ‘good guy’ Bile to Discord to negotiate this deal, and when terms were settled I grudgingly agreed to the sale. It felt like bending the knee, something I don’t do, but it was the right thing to do. Any returning TC members will find themselves in an Imperial Keepstar instead of podded and with titans etc in asset safety. The deal was sealed and decommissioning canceled, literally the day before MC put up their own Keepstar. We used a Chribba corp to hold the citadels during the transition period of our organised withdrawal. Who knows what Chribba will do with his awesome new corp, Wizards Sleeve Industries [H4T].
Of course F-core will, I hope, flourish again when surrounded by ratters and miners instead of pvpers, so there is at least that positive outcome of an Imperial Fountain. Funnily enough, F-core members have always been quick to inform us that they have lived in Fountain for ten years and they would be living here when we are finally gone. I couldn’t agree more, they will probably still be here, camping the same gates, doing the same missions and living in the same NPC stations, but for TC, Eve is bigger than just Fountain.
We have successfully moved all our titans and supers, without a single loss, from Fountain to Derelik and finally Curse. I have positioned TC right in the centre of what I believe will become the next big war in Eve. I think PGL is correct in his assumption that ‘if’ FCON fall, and DRF pulls back to the Drone Regions, then Test is the next ripe target that will be attacked by all content-hungry PvP alliances in the south. That is my speculative opinion about the growing southern conflict and I may be wrong, but I was correct with regards WWB so I’m confident enough to put my prediction in ink again.
In Closing
There is no doubt The-Culture is not an alliance for everybody. Corporations that have done well, have been able to do things on their own, finding small-scale combat to keep themselves challenged. We are not a ‘Ping warrior’ alliance; if your corp members sit around waiting for a ping from your chosen alliance level FC, you would have fallen into inactivity and left or died. I have been less than able to manage the USTZ of TC, the lack of good leadership available in that timezone was a real strain. A mixture of low recruitment standards and, in the past, lack of FC’s has hamstrung their ability to win once Raknor went to bed.
Fountain has served its purpose as far as I am concerned. Until recently, the majority of Eve had been in a fairly static arms race of super and titan construction. TC’s corps are no exception. Speaking for my corp, we have built a fleet of titans, both line members and the ones I gave out to my content providers and organisers. We have breed an environment of effort equals recognition, and we reward through goals and objectives achieved. I hope the other corps have had as much internal success in growing into powerful and organised fighting units as P3AK has.
I’m immensely proud of what everybody in TC achieved in creating something strong and, as far as was possible, independent. Perhaps we stayed in Fountain a month or two too long, perhaps I should have provided more alliance level content, but I believe we just adapted to the mechanics of CCP’s game and of course the relatively isolated geography of Fountain.
Most of all, being an old school egomaniac FC, I’m proud of myself, because I’m awesome at this. Of course without many people doing most of the work TC would be shit or dead, especially Raknor Bile, our trusted head FC. Also worth a mention are Bronzer Lift and Hektor for tirelessly organising renters and TC’s infrastructure. But it was my vision, drive and ultimately my decisions along the way, that history will decide were good or bad, right or wrong. I say this as we fail cascade. Lol.
Thanks for reading.
Editor’s Note: This article was provided to us by Harvey Skywalker, and has been published as-is with only minor technical corrections.
